Oppression and Liberation

Plots from the 19th Century

Operatic plots from the 19th century run the entire gammut from the most
elaborate fantasy to the most gritty reflections of daily life. Composers
of the late 20th century who draw upon historical events and people from
the 19th century, invariably find stories of downtrodden women and enslaved
or colonized peoples to set to music.

The Plight of Women

Album cover for Douglas Moore's Ballad of Baby Doe

Stories of 19th-century women who defied the social norms of the period
have interested composers and librettists more than any other subject. The
biographies of Baby Doe Tabor, Harriet Tubman, Emeline Gurney, Carry Nation,
and Lizzie Borden are poignant examples of extraordinary women's lives. They
are indeed out of the ordinary for their courage and persistence despite
the oppression of the dominant male culture.

Baby Doe Tabor

Douglas
Moore's Ballad of Baby Doe (1958) recounts the tragic life of Baby Doe Tabor,
who wooed a millionaire away from his frugal first wife, married him in
grand style, and watched as the millions dissappeared and her husband die
in misery. Rather than abandon him or his memory, Baby Doe lived the rest of
her life holding on to the one possession that her husband told her never to
sell, the Matchless Mine in Leadville, Colorado. She froze to death in a shack
on the mine's property in 1935.

Douglas Moore

This plot is attractive dramatically for numerous reasons. It contains familiar
themes and structures from classical Greek tragedy and epic: the reversal
of fortune at any moment (here it happens twice); the overweening pride
of the rich and powerful, the wife who is faithful until death. That this
plot holds a mirror up to Amerian society of the 1950s is unsurprising;
what is surprising, however, is that the plot is largely drawn from history,
not from drama.

Emeline Gurney

Many
women of the 19th century had no such rags to riches story, no good fortune
to reverse. In fact, poverty and abuse were the lot of girls from all
over New England, whose parents sent them to work in the mills towns of
Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island.
Emeline Bachelder Gurney was such a young woman. Born in 1816 (er death
date is not recorded), her story begins like so many others. She
is sent from the family farm in Fayette, Maine to work in a mill, becomes
pregnant at age 13 by a mill foreman, gives birth to a son, sells
the baby to a middle-class couple, and returns home to Fayette. Her story
diverges from the norm in that she unwittingly married her son,
whom she met at ages 68 when the infant had become young man. A novel
by Judith Rossner and a PBS documentary entitle "Sins of Our Mothers" brought
the Gurney's story to the attention of composer Tobias Picker (see the review
of the documentary in a Jan.
17, 1989 New York Times article by John J. Connors).

Patricia Racette, as Tobias Picker's Emmeline at the Santa Fe Opera production in 1996

Once again, the elements of Greek tragedy found in the life of a 19th
century woman make for excellent plot material. The theme of the woman
who unknowingly marries her own son and is an object of horror to herself,
to her husband, and to her community is instantly recognizable to those
who know Sophocles' Oedipus
Rex. Unlike Jocosta of the play, however, this American woman bore up
under the weight of communal scorn and had the courage to live. Tobias Picker
writes, "Since this story appealed ot me on such a visceral level, I felt
certain it would appeal to others, that I could make it speak to everyone,
if they allowed themselves to feel the complex, primal emotions I had" (liner
notes to the Santa Fe Opera's live recording in 1996).

Liner notes for the New York City Opera's 1968 recording of Douglas Moore's Carry Nation

Carry Nation

The story of David Nation's crusading wife may not immediately bring to mind
the theme of oppressed women. During her lifetime, many men might have
genuinely felt that Carry Nation was oppressing them! However, she saw
her marriage to her dashing first husband, physician Charles A. Gloyd,
destroyed by his alcoholism, and sought later in life to make certain that
no woman ever suffered the ill effects of what she called in her autobiography "the
curse of rum". Dr. Gloyd died two years into their marriage, leaving her
an infant daughter. Six year later, she married David Nation, whom she
believed deceived her and who later divorced her. She began her career
of "smashings" of "joints," the word she used to describe saloons, in Kiowa,
Kansas, in 1900. She died in 1911, and her headstone was provided by the
Women's Christian Temperance Union.

Douglas Moore's opera (libretto by William North Jayme) examines a small
slice of Carry Nation's life, her brief marriage to her first husband Charles,
from 1865 to 1867. Alcohol, religious fanaticism, and the American Civil
War have a constant presence in the lives of this couple and threaten to
destroy their happiness. Though plot clearly is subsidiary to characterization
in this opera, it is the plot that provides what Joseph Wilkins called
in his review in the Topeka Daily Capital "a rich patchwork quilt of
Americana"
(liner notes for the New York City Opera recording, 1968).

Lizzie Bordon and Harriet Tubman: Two women, four musical dramas

One hailed as a national hero, the other suspected of the greatest butchery
of her own family, the stories of both Harriet Tubman and Lizzie Bordon
have so inspired composers that each woman is the subject of two musical
dramas.

Harriet Tubman

An escaped slave herself, Harriet
Tubman is perhaps the best-known of the conductors on the Underground
Railroad that brought black slaves out of the South to freedom. Making
some 19 trips and leading some 300 men and women out of slavery, Harriet
Tubman's life was set twice to music by the same composer, Scottish-born Thea
Musgrave.Harriet,
the Woman called Moses, premiered in Norfolk,
Virginia on March 1, 1985. Musgrave herself calls the story an example
of "the age-old conflict between good and evil ... Harriet is every
woman who dared to defy injustice and tyranny". Musgrave's
second work, The
Story of Harriet Tubman (1990), is a chamber version of the earlier
opera and was premiered by the Mobile (AL) Opera in 1993.

Painting of Harriet Tubman
leading slaves to freedom, by Paul Collins

Thea Musgrave

Virginia Opera production of Harriet, the Woman called Moses

Lizzie Bordon

The story of Lizzie Bordon, the New England woman accused and acquitted
of murdering her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892 in Fall River,
MA, is so well known that it has become a jump-rope rhyme. Lizzie and
the maid Bridget Sullivan were the only members of the household at home
when the crime took place, but only Lizzie was charged. No one has ever
been tried and convicted of the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden.

Jack
Beeson writes in the liner notes to his 1965 opera Lizzie Borden that
he only uses some of the facts and theories about 1892 case to create
his plot. He sees this story as "a latter-day New England Elektra story,
with the parents switched, the 'evil stepmother' in the place of Klytemnestra."
Each desire of the opera's main character is frustrated, each outlet
closed down, and the murders occur as the result of years of abuse. The
plot of Christopher
McGovern's 1998 musical centers on a different kind of
abuse, an illlicit relationship between Andrew and his daughter which
was discovered by Lizzie's love interest Robert (see the excellent comparative review of
Beeson and McGovern's settings by Carl A. Rossi).

Album cover for "Lizzie Borden" The Musical"

Unauthenticated photo of Lizzie Borden

Ulla Sippola as Lizzie in a 1992 Theater Hagen production of Lizzie Borden

The Fight for Liberation from Slavery and Colonization

Liberation is a second strong theme of the history of 19th century America. While women and the children of former slaves and colonized
people may not have yet won complete freedom from oppression, the origens of their struggles
are dramatic and compelling stories for opera and musical theater.

Simon Bolivar, Lima, 1825, by José Gil de Castro

Simón Bolívar is considered by many in Latin America to be the father of
the revolutions that, region by region, wrested much of the continent
from Spanish dominion. He is credited with leading the wars of independence
in what is now Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Bolivia, and Venezuela.
The 1992 opera
by Thea Musgrave that bears his name is driven by characterization
and theme, rather than plot. It nonetheless gives us a hero with the charisma,
the drive, and the spirit to make of dreams reality.

Anthony and Thulani Davis's Amistad

Heroic action is no less part of Anthony
Davis's opera Amistad (1997,libretto
by his cousin Thulani Davis). The struggle of African captives who mutinied against
their Spanish captors and, landing on the shores of New York, were judged free men and women in
a famous court case, is history. The plot of Davis's opera, however, combines the events of 1839
with traditional African psychological reality that is populated with deities. The Trickster God and the Goddess of Waters
participate fully in the liberation of Africans who were never slaves, but rather free people.